- In this video, I'm gonna give you my take
what you should be tracking and what not.
All and more coming up right after this.
(upbeat electronic music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video
of measureschool.com where we teach you
the data-driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian, and normally on this channel,
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials
and give you tips on better tracking, just like this one.
And today I wanna talk about an often asked question,
what you should be tracking for your website.
Now, there are many different opinions on that,
I will give you my take on this,
and I hope you find it useful.
We've got lots to cover, so let's dive in.
All right, so you have installed Google Analytics,
you have been tracking for a while,
and then you discover this channel
and find out about Google Tag Manager
and all these cool tracking techniques
that you can implement.
But at some point, you ask yourself
or you get overwhelmed and ask yourself,
"What should I actually be tracking?"
And that's a fair question that I get asked by
many clients all over the world.
And I actually turn it around and ask them,
"What should you be tracking?"
And their answer is often, "Let's track everything!"
If you think about it, Google Analytics is free,
we can just push in data as many as we want
until we hit that limit of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.
We also can use Google Tag Manager to put in
all the data that we want,
we have all these tracking techniques available.
And then we don't have to deal with the fear
of missing out because Google Analytics doesn't let us
put in data retroactively, so we should be pushing in
everything we can in order to get
the most insight out of it, right?
So here's the problem that I see with this.
More data doesn't always equal more insight.
Because, if you think about it,
data and tracking is quite expensive.
First of all, you would need to come up with a plan,
and strategic planning to implement a data that you want.
Then you would actually need to implement it
or pay somebody to implement it for you.
You need to maintain that data,
because data quality is very important
in order to be able to use it later on and analyze it.
And tracking breaks all the time.
Then you would need to actually analyze it,
so you would need to have somebody who can run analysis
on it and actually get the insights that you would need,
that would be useful for you.
And then take the last step of actually
putting it into action.
In most companies or bigger companies,
you would actually need to have somebody
that lobbies for this change, the change to happen
within the organization.
And, by the way, that's why sometimes
it's hard to outsource analytics,
because you don't have somebody to convince them,
or upper management, you don't have the standing
in the company to lobby for a change
within the organization.
So all of these steps combined, I would argue,
big data, or a lot of data, is actually pretty expensive
to maintain and to make useful for your organization.
So what is the solution here?
I would argue you should stay intentional
with your tracking.
What does that mean?
Well, if you think about the data that you are collecting,
you should be thinking about how will this actually impact
my business, my behavior within the company.
How will I change based on the metric
or the tracking technique that I try to implement?
So I'm a big fan of actually coming up
with a measurement plan first of all,
that defines your business objectives,
your macro goals and your micro goals.
And that are the essential things that
you should be tracking.
You should take the different tracking techniques,
and if you discover a new one, always ask yourself,
"If I implement this, will this change
"the behavior of anybody around me
"that is working with the data?"
And I would argue only if you have very meaningful data
in your repository, you're actually incentivized
to analyze it and dig through the data,
and not be overwhelmed by too much data points
and you don't know really how they correlate.
So in conclusion, what should you actually be tracking?
Well, only data that is really applicable to your business,
that is customized to your business,
and you should do it intentionally,
so think about the data and the framework
that you would use in order to track
the right metrics for your business.
And I hope, with these tips, you will be able to decide,
when you see a new tracking technique
or a new analytics way out there,
should you be tracking this, should you install this?
Well, how does this change my behavior,
will these metrics actually matter
to me and my organization?
Think about that first before you start
installing more and more tracking tools,
have more and more data.
I hope you find this video useful.
Now, this is a new style of video,
where I share my opinion about tracking.
If you like that or have any comments on it,
please leave them in the comments below.
As always, if you like this video,
please share it to a friend or a colleague,
hit that Subscribe button because we'll bring you
new videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian, till next time.